All,
I just returned today from a business trip to VA Beach. I was staying at a hotel right on the beach and the VA beach is something to behold. It is super clean and of course the scenery is fantastic. Across the street from the hotel is the main drag (Atlantic Ave I think) and it is full of dive bars that look like a bunch of ex Navy Chiefs cobbled them together after they retired.
Wednesday night I went to one of the dive bars across the street from my hotel and they happened to have a guy playing acoustic guitar with a drummer. Strange combo but it worked. I was standing about 5' away from the drummer. The drummer had a very small drum set. This isn't the first time I have been that close to a drummer before, but it is always amazing when you hear it again. As I was standing there listening to the combo play, I was once again struck by how far we are from being able to capture the sound of a drum kit being played. The amount of energy that comes off of a set of drums is just incredible and we are not capturing anywhere near that energy on any recording medium. Oh sure, we all have recordings which have great drum "sound," but we don't have recordings that come close to the sound of an actual drum kit being played. And no, the Sheffield drum album doesn't come close either less anyone is pondering that notion. I am going to take a WAG and say with our current technology, we are capturing maybe 70% of what is there to be heard live. Why is that?
If I had to lay the finger of blame on the cause, my guess wold be the microphones we use. I don't think that any microphone currently known to man is capable of capturing that type of energy. I think it would take some new microphone technology if we are ever going to get there. And if we could ever get microphones to really faithfully capture the sound of a drum kit, I think we would all really need much more powerful amplifiers than most of us are currently using. I really think that we would need amps in the KW range to reproduce the sound without clipping which would also mean most of us would need different speakers.
And I don't mean to get hung up on just the sound of drums. I had a similiar experience a month or so ago when I was in San Diego at a Mexican restaurant in Old Town. I wrote about that experience before when the guy was blowing a trumpet and knocking the dust off the ceiling. That live sound is so powerful that again we are not close to capturing all of the energy that is to be heard live.
I keep coming back to the word "energy," and unless/until I can come up with something better I am going to stick with it. I think that failing to capture all of the energy that instruments are reproducing is the missing third dimension that keeps recordings sounding like recordings vice sounding like live music. And don't get me wrong, I am glad our systems sound as good as they do and they bring us great pleasure-but don't think for a minute that we are actually capturing and playing back everything that is to be heard live. If that is ever going to happen, we are going to need some type of breakthrough in recording technology and I think it starts with microphones. Of course I could be dead wrong about microphones being the culprit, but that is my guess.
I also want to be clear on something with regards to energy and that is don't confuse loudness levels with total energy capture. I do think that with the gear we have now, in order to play back recordings and make them sound as real as the medium will allow you, you do have to set your playback levels so they approximate the levels the music was actually played at. You can't turn you stereo down to a whisper and somehow think you are going to get there. I am pretty sure that most of us here have systems that are capable of playing at realistically live levels with speakers that move plenty of air. And I think that moving lots of air is also critical if you are to have any chance of playing back recordings and making them sound as real as the current state of the art allows. However, it doesn't matter how loud and clean you can play back recordings if the recordings you are playing back never contained all of the energy of the actual recorded event in the first place (and they don't). And I guess that is my point, we just aren't able to capture all of the energy that is there and that is what is holding us back from total "realness."
Any thoughts?
Mark
I just returned today from a business trip to VA Beach. I was staying at a hotel right on the beach and the VA beach is something to behold. It is super clean and of course the scenery is fantastic. Across the street from the hotel is the main drag (Atlantic Ave I think) and it is full of dive bars that look like a bunch of ex Navy Chiefs cobbled them together after they retired.
Wednesday night I went to one of the dive bars across the street from my hotel and they happened to have a guy playing acoustic guitar with a drummer. Strange combo but it worked. I was standing about 5' away from the drummer. The drummer had a very small drum set. This isn't the first time I have been that close to a drummer before, but it is always amazing when you hear it again. As I was standing there listening to the combo play, I was once again struck by how far we are from being able to capture the sound of a drum kit being played. The amount of energy that comes off of a set of drums is just incredible and we are not capturing anywhere near that energy on any recording medium. Oh sure, we all have recordings which have great drum "sound," but we don't have recordings that come close to the sound of an actual drum kit being played. And no, the Sheffield drum album doesn't come close either less anyone is pondering that notion. I am going to take a WAG and say with our current technology, we are capturing maybe 70% of what is there to be heard live. Why is that?
If I had to lay the finger of blame on the cause, my guess wold be the microphones we use. I don't think that any microphone currently known to man is capable of capturing that type of energy. I think it would take some new microphone technology if we are ever going to get there. And if we could ever get microphones to really faithfully capture the sound of a drum kit, I think we would all really need much more powerful amplifiers than most of us are currently using. I really think that we would need amps in the KW range to reproduce the sound without clipping which would also mean most of us would need different speakers.
And I don't mean to get hung up on just the sound of drums. I had a similiar experience a month or so ago when I was in San Diego at a Mexican restaurant in Old Town. I wrote about that experience before when the guy was blowing a trumpet and knocking the dust off the ceiling. That live sound is so powerful that again we are not close to capturing all of the energy that is to be heard live.
I keep coming back to the word "energy," and unless/until I can come up with something better I am going to stick with it. I think that failing to capture all of the energy that instruments are reproducing is the missing third dimension that keeps recordings sounding like recordings vice sounding like live music. And don't get me wrong, I am glad our systems sound as good as they do and they bring us great pleasure-but don't think for a minute that we are actually capturing and playing back everything that is to be heard live. If that is ever going to happen, we are going to need some type of breakthrough in recording technology and I think it starts with microphones. Of course I could be dead wrong about microphones being the culprit, but that is my guess.
I also want to be clear on something with regards to energy and that is don't confuse loudness levels with total energy capture. I do think that with the gear we have now, in order to play back recordings and make them sound as real as the medium will allow you, you do have to set your playback levels so they approximate the levels the music was actually played at. You can't turn you stereo down to a whisper and somehow think you are going to get there. I am pretty sure that most of us here have systems that are capable of playing at realistically live levels with speakers that move plenty of air. And I think that moving lots of air is also critical if you are to have any chance of playing back recordings and making them sound as real as the current state of the art allows. However, it doesn't matter how loud and clean you can play back recordings if the recordings you are playing back never contained all of the energy of the actual recorded event in the first place (and they don't). And I guess that is my point, we just aren't able to capture all of the energy that is there and that is what is holding us back from total "realness."
Any thoughts?
Mark